Thread: My Death Trap
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Old 11-16-2010, 12:31 AM   #30 (permalink)
Frank Lee
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Blue - '93 Ford Tempo
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Clev View Post
In the past 40 years, cars have gotten smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient, roads have gotten worse, more cars are on the road, drivers' training is all but worthless, more semis are on the road and speed limits have increased. During that same period, fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles have gone from over 6 to 1.13. How do you think this was accomplished? It sure as hell isn't because we're better drivers.

Hell, the fatalities per miles traveled has been cut almost in half just since 1990, which was the year of the introduction of the Ford Explorer and the beginning of the massive adoption of SUVs. The fact that we've made enough progress to cut the death rate in half since then despite the increasing widening of the gap between the heaviest and lightest cars on the road should speak to how effective these measures have been.

By the way, who has been saying that cars need to be 3,500 pounds to be safe? You keep trotting that out over and over again, but in a collision, I'll take a 2,311 pound Yaris over your 2,723 pound Tempo any day.
Cars have NOT gotten smaller. Almost without exception, models grow with every successive redesign.

Cars have NOT gotten lighter. IIRC, in that '59 vs '09 Impala crash, the '09 is the HEAVIER car.

BTW, I've had my Tempo on the scale- it's 2470 lbs.

Edit: '59 vs '09 Impala: 3625 lbs "shipping weight" (whatever that is) vs. 3555 curb weight.


Roads have NOT gotten worse. There are more of them and more safety hazards have been mitigated.

Your batting average in that first paragraph ain't too good.

This thing was started by GM bragging about some piddling "weight reduction" on the Cruze- a small car that weighs half a Ton more than mine. Then I said my old 5 passenger car does have good safety features, including air bag- more than adequate in my book- so it is odd to think that if we want better performance including fe performance, we are saddled with an extra 1,000 It was 3500 lbs or so right? Oh- it was 32xx then the engineering miracles took about 200 out. The point wasn't primarily about Tempos, it's primarily about new cars being excessively heavy. Regardless, just about everything sub-compact and up weighs 3000 or more these days.
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Last edited by Frank Lee; 11-16-2010 at 01:11 AM..
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